There are a wide range of instances where a group of individuals are coordinated for an event. Examples of such events can include, but are not limited to, birthday parties, weddings, christenings, funerals, school trips, concerts, business meetings, conferences, charity events, and reunions. Today, in order to set up such events a range of options exist with respect to communication tools including, for example, Simple Messaging Service (SMS), telephone, social media such as Facebook™, messaging services such as Twitter™, email, and web based services such as Google Events.
In the majority of instances these events are based at a particular location (e.g. an office, church, restaurant, concert hall, etc.) although in other instances these may be a range of locations (e.g. a charity run requiring volunteers at the start, finish and runner registration). When one or more of those invited or expected at a location does not appear then others must text, email, or call, trying to find out where they are. However, in many instances the missing individual(s) are currently travelling to that particular location and may, for example when driving, not be able to receive or reply to a telephone call, text, or email. At the same time they may not be familiar with the particular location, the neighbourhood or area around the particular location, etc. and hence actually find it difficult even when they are able to reply to provide an estimate of their arrival time or time to arrival.
Within the prior art there are smartphone applications that allow a user to track their friends. These include:                Trackster is an Apple iOS and Google Android smartphone Global Positioning System (GPS) based application. It allows a user to track, find and follow their friends who have also downloaded the application. It provides this information on a map. It also allows a user to tweet their location, choose who can track them, and allow them to text their friends.        Loopt is a smartphone application supporting iOS, Blackberry 10 and OS operating systems, Android, and Windows mobile platforms. Similar to Trackster the Loopt application allows a user to see where their friends are who have also downloaded the application and what they are doing.        BrightKite is a location-based social networking tool allowing a user to post their location and track where people are. In addition, BrightKite offers unlimited group texting with multiple friends in various locations.        Yahoo Fire Eagle is a free application allowing a user to send receive updates, track their friends, and see what is going on.        Find My Friends allows a user to locate their friends and family from their Apple iOS devices such as iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. It displays upon a map where the user's friends are relative to the user's location.        GPS Tracking Pro allows a user to track family and friends through real-time location tracking using an Android device.        Google Latitude allows a user to view their friends upon a map, control who sees their location, at what level of detail, and check in at places to let friends know the user is there.        
However, in all of these prior art applications it is a requirement that the user and the individual have not only a prior association within one another but that the individual has authorised the application to disclose their location. In the majority of these prior art applications it is also a requirement that the user and the individual are using the same application. In the majority of instances where the user and individual are not family or close friends then the individual does not wish to have the user know their location. In other instances, such as the Toronto Waterfront Marathon where there is a small organizing team and approximately 3,000 volunteers then ensuring all the volunteers have downloaded the application of choice of the event is an overhead the event can ill afford and then tracking a small number of volunteers within this larger number a significant issue as these prior art applications are primarily intended for tracking a small number of user's. Scrolling a list of 3,000 volunteers to enable, for example, the 10 missing volunteers to be located would take a user a significant period of time. Partitioning the list between multiple users only succeeds in creating additional management overhead and communications issues within the event organizers.
Accordingly, it would be beneficial to provide individuals, enterprises, organizers, etc. with the ability to establish allocation of an individual or group of individuals rapidly, with low complexity and management overhead, and without requiring that the two parties exploit the same software application or establish a relationship akin to friends within these prior art applications.
Other aspects and features of the present invention will become apparent to those ordinarily skilled in the art upon review of the following description of specific embodiments of the invention in conjunction with the accompanying figures.